most people i know use google by searching whatever question they have and including the word “reddit” at the end to find reddit threads since it currently has the most useful information.
As Lemmy gets more and more filled with useful threads and reviews it would be great if we can collectively improve Lemmy’s SEO so just including the word lemmy in a search will show lemmy threads related to the search.
The obscure tlds used in lemmy servers don’t help and lemmy.com currently redirects to lemm.ee. Is there a way we can improve the SEO of all instances or have lemmy.com be a aggregator of threads from many Lemmy servers?
I think once there is enough info on lemmy it’ll just get to the point where the searches will bring up the information you need.
I feel like if I’m searching on Google I want it to take me to the most relevant source of information even if that still is reddit. It won’t always be. But it is still right now.
Nothing wrong with competition, it’ll give better search results.
Lemmy and other federated systems being spread out across individual instances does make things more difficult. Normally you could just do “site:reddit.com” and automatically filter all results to be from Reddit. But you can’t do that because your result could be on any one of hundreds of instances, many of which do not have “lemmy” in their title.
It appear reasonably large instances like lemmy.one have been indexed, i got results using site:lemmy.one. and for those larger instances, they should still be able to index federated content.
Maybe I’m misinterpreting what you’re saying, but lemmy.one has basically no content on it other than the 8 communities that @jonah has created or allowed there. The whole point of that server is to allow people to simply login and then participate in other instances from there.
That is all to say, lemmy.one would be one of the “smaller” instances from a standpoint of content to be indexed by Google.
The whole point of that server is to allow people to simply login and then participate in other instances from there.
In order for users on lemmy.one to interact with content on other instances, lemmy.one has to import and host that content. So, it has plenty of content on it, just most of it originated elsewhere. That remote content should be just as indexable as local content.
I think it would be best if each post had a canonical tag pointed at the originating server’s version of that post. The lemmy ui generates a canonical tag now but I’m not sure it doesn’t just point to itself.
I didn’t quite realize that, figured that when you were viewing another instances’ content it was loading from that instance. I guess that means that Lemmy content across all instances has loads of redundant copies.
Before this is of value we need to get another 100 million users and exist for 20 years
Because we will never reach a billion users and exist for 200 years like yo momma.
We just need years of community created content. EzPz
Unpopular opinion, but I don’t want that. I don’t want to start adding SEO stuff. If we have good content Google can figure out how to index it better themselves.
Just curious, why not? Everything on the Fediverse is already public, by nature of federation. I think making the information shared here more easily discoverable is always a good thing.
Not OP but I think the point is not to force it but just let it happen organically.
SEO really doesn’t work organically, though. That’s why there’s a whole industry devoted to it.
there’s a lot of “exclusivity” behaviour on this community that I’ve noticed (and a loooot of us vs the mentality too, in regards to twitter/reddit/bluesky/mastodon)
Yeah, I think a lot of the new Reddit refugees are failing to realize that Lemmy and the Fediverse existed before the recent migration and expect everything to just work the way they want, instead of how it’s been working just fine without them for years. The Fediverse doesn’t “belong” to them, and open connections are what this platform is built on.
